ofxChoc

Description

this is a work in progress, currently more a proof of concept, still bugs and not yet stable this addon comes with the following features webview webserver oF js runtime (wip) chocons — dynamic plugin libraries for extra JS bindings (e.g. ofxOsc) filewatcher non-blocking file and message dialogs ... more to come

Usage

cd path/to/openFrameworks/addons git clone https://github.com/thomasgeissl/ofxChoc on linux: sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev (4.0 on older distros: libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev) cd ofxChoc/example-webview make -j8 && make run

Examples

This addon comes with a couple of example example-webview: simple webview, html source set at runtime, no webserver example-webserver_webview: webview and webserver example-filewatcher: watches local files or directories ofJsRuntime: oF app that executes JavaScript code, it comes with a couple of oF bindings (wip) chocons/ofxOsc: dynamic binding library for ofxOsc (used by examples-js/chocons/) example-custombindings: minimal example showing how to call a JS function from C++ and expose a C++ member function to JS choc: basic usage of choc webview, without openframeworks to debug a bug on linux

JS Runtime

The JS runtime embeds QuickJS via choc and exposes openFrameworks as a of. API to JavaScript. Scripts are hot-reloadable and can drive the full oF render loop.

Built-in of. bindings

A subset of the oF API is available out of the box, e.g. of.getWidth(), of.background(), of.drawCircle(), new of.Fbo(), new of.Shader(), new of.Vec2(). See src/ofBindings/ for the full list.

examples-js/ includes an of.d.ts type definitions file and a jsconfig.json — open the folder in VS Code to get autocompletion for the of. API.

Custom bindings

Expose any C++ free function with automatic type marshalling:

bindFn(context, "jsName", &myCppFunction);

Expose a member function by passing the object pointer:

bindFn(context, "jsName", this, &MyClass::myMethod);

See example-custombindings for a minimal working example.

Chocons (plugin system)

Chocons are shared libraries (.dylib / .so) that extend the JS runtime at load time — without recompiling ofJsRuntime. They wrap oF addons (or any C++ you need) and expose a JS API under the ofx. namespace (built-in bindings stay on of.).

When you run a script with -f path/to/script.js, the runtime loads every chocon from:

1. <scriptDir>/chocons/ (next to your script — overrides bundled copies) 2. data/chocons/ (shipped inside the app bundle in releases)

Each chocon exports ofxChoc_registerChocon and ofxChoc_clearChocon. Source and build scaffolding live in chocons/; the first one included is ofxOsc (ofx.osc.Sender / ofx.osc.Receiver).

Build a chocon locally:

cd chocons/ofxOsc
make

Release builds compile chocons in CI and bundle them into data/chocons/ alongside ofJsRuntime — binaries are not committed to git.

See examples-js/README.md (Chocons section) for load paths, the OSC API, and example scripts.

Running a script

cd ofJsRuntime
make -j8 && ./bin/ofJsRuntime -f ../examples-js/follow-mouse.js --watch

Pass --watch to hot-reload the script on every save.